In my research, I’ve been most interested in the problem of ownership rights as expressed in several cultural forms, including imaginative literature, legal writings, political discourse, and popular culture. My most recent book, Family Money: Property, Race, and Literature in the Nineteenth Century(Oxford UP, 2012), studies the intersections of racial difference, property rights, and legal notions of the family. I focus particularly on the economic consequences of interracial sexuality in the nineteenth century, and argue that various forms of intimacy across the color line became flash points for the distribution—and possible redistribution—of wealth. Understanding racial difference to be both an emotional and a legal structure, I study how judges decreed and literary authors imagined property moving—or being prevented from moving—back and forth across the sometimes mutable color line in the nineteenth century, as well as how these movements both shaped, and were in turn shaped by, the often competing notions of family as legal construct, social practice, and literary idea. At issue here are the financial claims that were made or refused in the name of “family”; the permissions and taboos that choreographed the dance of race and sex; the ambiguities of love and recrimination; and the struggles over what family and economic rights meant to and for each other as desires sometimes grated against and sometimes conformed to laws and social norms regarding racial difference.